17-year old LA Current swimmer Anastasia Gorbenko has been on fire at the 2020 ISL season, breaking multiple Israeli National and European Junior records over her team’s first two meets.
In match #3 this weekend, she broke out a new trick, adding flipturns to her breaststroke swims.
A video clip of the turn in the final 50 of the skins race, which she ultimately lost to Alia Atkinson, is below:
Gorbenko hadn’t swum any individual breaststroke races this season prior to Match #5 last week, though she had swum breaststroke in the midst of IM and 400 medley relay events. She hadn’t previously used the flipturn prior to Match #5, however. Here’s her in the leading 400 medley relay from Match #3:
We’ve seen a few other swimmers use breaststroke and butterfly flipturns at levels of certain success, like David Fitch at the NCAA Division III National Championship meet, or Joe Gardner at the Big Ten Championships, but I couldn’t find anybody who had attempted the technique at this high of a level.
The idea is simple – you touch the wall with two hands, as required by the rule, using a downward sweeping motion to initiate the flip via your last stroke.
A few observations here:
- Gorbenko goes into the wall slightly ahead of Alia Atkinson in the women’s 50 breaststroke skins final, and comes up swimming again behind Atkinson, who would go on to finish the race.
- Alia Atkinson is one of the strongest breaststrokers in the world and traditionally has had very powerful underwater pullouts, especially on the 50, so don’t be deceived by the side-by-side.
- There was nothing obviously wrong with Gorbenko’s regular breaststroke turns. She came in and out of the wall rather quickly.
- While Gorbenko is fine through the wall, her pullouts aren’t her strength – evidenced by the fact that she rushes through them to get back to the surface racing, a la Adam Peaty.
- More evidence from more races would be needed (including more ‘traditional’ turns’) to determine definitively if there was any significant advantage or disadvantage here, but from where I sit, it looks like no obvious advantage, in exchange for a new skill that has a higher probability of a “missed turn.”
Hopefully, Gorbenko will continue to use this skill in future meets so that we can grab more data points to analyze it. The 2020 ISL bubble, with an all-elite training atmosphere, with many of the world’s best coaches concentrated in one space, and with the opportunity to race weekend-after-weekend, gives a good opportunity to innovate not only in presentation, but in technique as well.
I’m 99% positive I saw Alia do flip turns before at a local meet in Florida many years ago. She must not have found them to be advantageous.
If she wants it to be faster, she has to dive deeper down into the turn – begin to initiate before hands contact the wall, kind of like the crossover. Otherwise it’s too tight a space and there’s no advantage in time.
When the feet leaved the wall she is still on the back she is not on the side.
I think she should be DQ
Not faster
It looked like meters 25 to 40 was where Atkinson won it.
It would be useful to determine the time between when she touches the wall with her hands and when the feet leave the wall after the turn. If the times are the same for both techniques (from the same swimmer), I would say an open turn is better because you have the benefit of extra oxygen.
One thing that’s a bit deceiving is that Mel Marshall told Atkinson behind the blocks to blast the last 20 meters. She was going relatively easy the first 25 and then blasted off the wall. It makes it look like Gorbenko is standing still. No way Atkinson is behind at the 25 if she’s going all out in a rested 50 and maybe her wall pullout isn’t as comparatively dominating.
I’m convinced if 100 IM was swum as a truly major college/SCM event you’d start to see WAY more people do a flip on the fly to back turn. No twisting of the body to get to the right position off the turn, easier to get deeper, and short enough race (especially in yards) for the loss of air not to be a huge deal for the elites.